


What You Are Missing and I Can Never Have

by mmolloy



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, John is dumb, M/M, Mary is gone, Metafiction, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Season/Series 03 Fix-It, Same-Sex Marriage, Story: The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, Victorian Sherlock Holmes, Watson is wise, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 21:11:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4976698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mmolloy/pseuds/mmolloy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by this Tumblr post by johnlockghosts, which caught my imagination and would not let it go:</p><p>"I demand more fics about Watson meeting John and finding out that in their time gay marriage is legal and being like, so when do you plan to propose and John is like “we’re not a couple” and Watson is like “WHY THE FUCK NOT”</p>
            </blockquote>





	What You Are Missing and I Can Never Have

**Author's Note:**

> I sort of took a prompt from Tumblr and added in the Three Garridebs moment, because who doesn't love it? And we should have more of it, always. Thanks to johnlockghosts on Tumblr for the excellent and evocative prompt. I hope you enjoy!

It isn't as though John Watson has never experienced pain before.

When he was younger, here had been rugby injuries and falls from trees, the unpleasant sensation of being slapped during a breakup and the burn of acid in a botched lab procedure at uni. 

In the army, there had been the pain of muscles hardening beneath the vicious slog of basic, and the stupid, sharp sting of bending reddened limbs when he’d spent too long in the desert heat without sun lotion. There had been the hot, dizzy, surreal pain of the bullet burning through his shoulder, and the sick aching of the infection that had done his career in conclusively. The phantom pain in a perfectly healthy leg as he walked through a London park.

And pain had been a foregone conclusion in the life he’d shared with Sherlock. There had been plenty of minor bruises and scrapes—a few gory flesh wounds that he’d coached Sherlock through suturing for him during those heady eighteen months before everything had gone to hell. There had been the prick of needles in his neck and the subsequent blackouts, from which he awakened to find himself in some improbably dangerous scenario—strapped into a vest made of Semtex, buried like a hedgehog inside a Bonfire Night pyre. There had been the stinging bite of Magnussen’s manicured fingernails on the sensitive skin of his eyelids.

In each of those cases, there had been pain. He is a soldier, though, and a doctor, and has endured enough pain in his lifetime—has seen the faces of men he’s cared for wracked with it as their blood stained his fingers and the sand—to be able to adopt a sort of philosophical attitude about the electrical impulses in response to stimuli that the human brain processes as physical pain. It happens. It is unpleasant. You grit your teeth and you live through it.

But not all the _physical_ pain in the world could have prepared John Watson for the _psychic_ agony of having to look into Sherlock Holmes’ face after John puts himself between the detective and the gun fired in wild-eyed panic by the Victorian recreationist who is currently in possession of the priceless original manuscripts of a late 1800s detective series set to go on display at the V &A in a week’s time.

The bewildered, terrified horror in his best friend’s face burns worse than the gunshot he can feel like a red-hot poker in his side. Sherlock’s wide greybluegreen eyes _been trying so long to find a word for that color_ are shiny-wet, his cheeks already streaked with tear tracks _don’t want him to cry hate it when he’s sad_ and his lips _they’re so lovely even when he’s sad_ are trembling with the barely-controlled panic that John’s only seen a handful of times before.

It’s the same look that was on Sherlock’s face when John stepped out of a dressing cubicle beside an empty swimming pool. The same look he’d had when ripping a bomb from John’s adrenaline-weak body, dragging him roughly from a billow of smoke and licking flames, watching him try to hold still as Magnussen toyed with him.

“John! John?” Sherlock’s voice is rough with dread, almost unrecognizable as that same posh baritone that John still hears in his dreams while lying next to his _murderer liar assassin traitor gone now_ wife in a bed too far from Baker Street _happy real Sherlock home_. 

He wants to say something reassuring to Sherlock—cannot bear to watch the lost look on his face grow any more dismal—but the sudden shock of the bullet wound and the fall that came after have knocked the wind out of his lungs, so all he can do is gasp in labored breaths and try not to pass out and examine the singularly ugly, fading pattern of the wallpaper behind Sherlock’s head. 

“John,” Sherlock gasps again, and this time there is no mistaking the sob for what it is, and the pain in John’s chest that has nothing to do with the gunshot sharpens as Sherlock’s hands move—so, so gently—across his face and around to cradle his head in two large palms. The fact that he seems unable to say anything other than John’s own name—this man who he once thought would fight God himself for the last word—is about as frightening as everything else about watching this seemingly so unflappable man come apart at the seams while John can do nothing but lie bleeding on the scarred wooden floor of a dusty old Victorian sitting room.

“Sherl—Sherlock—“ he manages, because Sherlock’s face needs to stop crumbling.

“Don’t talk, idiot,” his friend snaps wildly, putting one trembling hand softly across John’s lips. “Don’t talk, don’t move, don’t die—oh Jesus, John, please don’t die not now I haven’t said—and I need to say—“ Sherlock breaks off with another sob, and the pain of the gunshot and the not-gunshot grow, and the wallpaper behind Sherlock’s head is peeling and unbearably old—

 

No it isn’t.

 

It’s bright and vivid and lies smoothly flush with the gleaming mahogany of the baseboards that themselves transition elegantly into the polished wood of the floor. The floor upon which he is laying but with no Sherlock above him and no flashing heat in his side.

John lies motionless for a long moment on a singularly luxurious Persian rug, trying to decide if he’s dead or not. From what he could tell from the placement of the excruciating pain, his injury should not have been lethal given timely medical attention. But had ‘timely’ run out? He has no way of knowing.

Odd-looking afterlife, if he is dead. He’d not thought that any next plane he’d be destined for would feature an ornately carved credenza. Or a fainting couch.

“You’re not dead, old man, so perhaps you should get up off the floor, there’s a good chap.”

Tentatively, John sits up, if for no other reason than to find the source of that dry, wry voice and give it a dirty look. But when he locates the source…

“What the bloody hell?” he says.

“A perfectly reasonable reaction to the situation, I should think,” he says.

He says?

He says.

Because as John levers himself from the ornate rug and into a standing position, he finds himself standing face-to-face with what appears to be— _bollocks, is that what I looked like with the moustache? That’s more embarrassing than I--_

“Though the choice may have been ill-advised in your time, I’ll have you know that it’s quite the fashion in mine,” says the other him, though John can see the flash of annoyance in his own eyes _and if that isn’t the weirdest thing_ and the pursing of his lips beneath the neatly-waxed facial hair. “So I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself, if you don’t mind.”

“Thought I was,” John replies calmly, because if he’s having a psychotic break, there’s no point in behaving unreasonably.

The other him’s mouth twitches in acknowledgement of the humor in their situation, and then he appears to remember his manners and holds out a familiar calloused hand.

“Call me Watson,” he says, squaring his shoulders in their tailored frock coat and clicking the heels of his polished boots. “Might get confusing, otherwise.”

“John,” says John, shaking his own hand. “And if _that’s_ the thing that’s going to confuse you—“

“Come now, John,” says Watson chidingly and with a whisper of condescension that immediately makes John’s hackles rise. “You’ve lived with Holmes—Sherlock, I suppose—long enough to glimpse the exceptionally unmatched potential of the properly-inspired human mind, I hope? Best not to waste too much time in whys and wherefores and just get on with it, I should think.”

“Get on with what? I don’t have any clue what’s going on here.”

“Nor I,” shrugs Watson. “But I’m sure Holmes… Sherlock will put all to rights. He’s got the knack for it.”

There is something soft about Watson’s smile when he says Sherlock’s given name, and it makes the same something in John’s chest twinge uncomfortably. Because he knows the thoughts behind that smile, and he hadn’t been aware that they showed quite so obviously on his face.

“In the meantime,” says Watson, gesturing expansively to the pair of olive green armchairs sat before the fireplace behind him. “Perhaps we can just pass a bit of time chatting? And I’d wager you could do with a large scotch.”

“Er. Yeah. Yes. Thanks.” John sinks with some trepidation into the armchair to the right of the fireplace—the position of his own armchair in 221B. “Largest one you’ve got, I think.”

Watson hums an acknowledgement, busying himself with the crystal decanter that glugs satisfyingly several times before he turns and hands a tumbler filled with amber liquid to John. John prevents himself from knocking back the whole thing at once, but it is a near thing, He takes a large, fortifying gulp to settle his nerves, looking up to meet Watson’s eyes from where he regards John shrewdly from the other chair.

“The fellow with the poorly-made coat had some manuscripts or some such, yes?” asks Watson, sipping his drink. John remembers the annoyance of damp whiskers against his upper lip, and watches with some amusement as Watson brushes impatiently at the moustache with the back of his free hand.

“Victorian detective stories,” agrees John. “Quite valuable, apparently. Homoerotic subtext present that got Bowlderized or analyzed or excused out of later versions, or something like that. Big, important find for the V&A.”

“Ah,” says Watson, looking interested. “Subtext, you say? Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? Imagine a writer outright stating some unnatural affection between two men? Why, he’d be thrown in jail and made to break rocks until the idea’d been beaten right out of him!”

“Back then, yeah,” says John, a little irritated at the apparent relish with which Watson proclaims the impossibility of a gay love story. “Things are a little less backwards, now. Not perfect, obviously, but better than breaking rocks by a long mile.”

“What?” And John sees why Sherlock constantly feels the need to point out when John is confused. The face the other him is making is a mixture of curiosity and consternation and a little bit of old-fashioned pissed off that is, John has to admit, pretty funny from this vantage point. “What do you mean, ‘less backwards’? You don’t mean to say… that is, what do you mean to say?”

“Being gay’s not such a big thing, now,” says John. “It’s not illegal, for one. I mean, there’s still a long way to go before everything’s rainbows and butterflies for everyone, but you can’t get thrown in jail for it in Britain, that’s for sure.”

Watson doesn’t say anything for a long moment, staring intently into his whiskey glass with a tightness around his eyes that John knows means he’s holding back anger or frustration or some combination of the two. When he finally does look up at John again, it’s with an expression on his face that John truly hopes he’ll never have cause to experience from the inside.

“One may love whom one wishes.” It doesn’t sound like a question.

“Hm? Yeah, you can,” John answers anyway. “Harry—Harriet?” Watson nods, his eyes narrowing slightly, “she got married a few years ago. To a woman. Her wife, Clara.” He decides not to mention the divorce—the concept might just prove too much for this other him. Best to take the conversation slowly.

 “Married?” Watson’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead, his knuckles white around his tumbler.

“Yeah,” confirms John. “Plenty of women marry other women. Men too. Marry other men, I mean. Totally legal, file joint taxes and everything.” He smiles, trying to soften the blow of this statement. Because he can tell it is a blow, from the way Watson’s eyes get shinier, how he clears his throat in the way John does when he’s trying to hold in strong emotions.

“We’ve always said,” Watson murmurs, his voice hoarse with suppressed feeling. “We’ve always said: perhaps in another time. Maybe in another century. Maybe the world would be ready for us, or we for it. In another time.”

John watches, oddly rapt, as a tiny smile grows on Watson’s face, though his eyes still glisten with tears he won’t allow to fall. He is fidgeting with something on his right hand, and when John looks more closely he realizes that he’s twisting a simple golden band around the fourth finger of his short, square hand.

And John cannot think of anything to say—feels the sudden burgeoning weight of this conversation keenly—and so allows the silence to build between them as he watches the gold on Watson’s finger glitter in the firelight and quietly drinks his scotch.

Finally, Watson looks up at him, his eyes suddenly keen and sharp and inquisitive.

“So, when will you and Holm—Sherlock be wed?”

“Wha—excuse me?” splutters John, choking on a sip of scotch.

“When will you be taking advantage of the most remarkable miracle of your age to make an honest man of the most remarkable miracle of _any_ age?”

John can feel his face growing warm and something guilty spreading up from his stomach. “We,” he stammers. “It’s just… we’re not… _he’s_ not…”

“Or have you already done it?” continues Watson, who does not appear to be listening, his eyes avid and bright as they scan John’s hands. He folds them in on themselves self-consciously, feeling unaccountably guilty for the lack of a ring for Watson to observe there. “Of course, you’ve already made the whole thing legal and binding! Silly of me to think you’d wait—what could possibly be the cause? If such a thing would not have got us thrown in prison, I would have asked him not very long after our very first case, so—“

“We’re not together,” interrupts John flatly. He can’t bear the happy, certain expression on his other face, doesn’t want to listen to how Holmes and Watson would handle all of the opportunities that he and Sherlock have been afforded by the world they live in, but have ignored or rejected or… something. He doesn’t want his face rubbed in what they could have had.

“I… I beg your pardon?” Watson’s voice holds an edge that means he’s trying not to swear, and John can’t meet his eyes for some reason, or he doesn’t want to see the look he’ll find there.

“We’re not together, Sherlock and I,” he says again. “Not like that. Not romantically. We’re just friends. He’s my best friend and I love him, of course I do, but it’s not— it’s never been like… that.”

And John suddenly realizes that he must be much more impressive than he feels when he’s got what Greg calls his ‘Captain John Watson’ face on, because it’s all he can do not to quail under the severity of the glare that is coming off Watson’s mustachioed face. He takes another fortifying gulp of scotch, and tries not to wince at the sharp sound of heavy glass being slammed against the wood of the end table. Watson suddenly looms above him, glowering down with an intensity that twinges in John’s lower belly— _oh, for heaven’s sake, you ridiculous egomaniacal bastard_ —and growls at John in a voice wracked with pain and disbelief and lots and lots of anger.

“You mean to tell me,” he begins, trying hard to keep his temper under control in a way that John sincerely hopes works better than it usually does for him, “that it is possible—acceptable, even—for you to stand before God and the whole of society and take _Sherlock Holmes_ , the best and bravest and wisest and most beautiful man in the word, to be your _husband_. To stand beside him in the eyes of the law, to proclaim for all the world to know the love you’ve always felt for each other, to wear his ring and have him wear yours, _and you have not done it_?”

Well. Put that way, it sounds ridiculous and irresponsible of him. John shifts uncomfortably in his chair, wishing there were more scotch and knowing very well not to ask for it. Watson is glaring at him and breathing sharply through his nose, and John knows that if he says or does the wrong thing here, that he will be on the receiving end of his own very impressive left hook. 

“He—listen. I’m not saying it hasn’t been a possibility for me,” begins John, feeling his heart constrict at giving voice to this admission. “I’ve thought about it, yeah. A lot, if you want to know. I even tried it on with him the first night we met, actually, and he—he just. He doesn’t feel things that way, I don’t think. Or if he does, it’s never been for me.” Visions of Irene Adler, of Jim Moriarty, of ‘give my love to Mary’ flicker through John’s mind, and he purses his lips to keep the pain off his face.

Watson is standing above him and looking down at him with a sort of sad, condescending humor. “He’s always telling me,” he murmurs, shaking his head and smiling wryly. “He’s always saying it. ‘You see, Watson, but you do not observe.’ I never imagined he’d be so right. Especially not about this. I’m just as oblivious as he says I am, apparently.”

“Oi,” begins John indignantly. “Look, I don’t know what he’s like where you’re from, but in 2015, I can tell you—“

“Stop being deliberately obtuse; you’re going to throw me in to an existential tailspin,” sneers Watson, and John did not know his face was capable of such nasty derision. “Honestly, if I had known it was going to be so depressing to see this from the outside, I never would have—“

“Then what the hell _are_ you doing here?” demands John, standing up and bullying his way into Watson’s space so they are nose-to-nose. “Tell me! If I’m such a coward, an imbecile, such a _bloody_ disappointment—“ and he pushes himself in the chest so that Watson stumbles back a few inches toward the other chair—“why even bother with the scotch and the ‘old chap’ and the whole metatheatrical conversation with myself, hm? If I’m so bloody clueless, what could possibly be—“

“Because it’s not to late to find a clue, even if you are an idiot,” states Watson calmly, looking directly into John’s eyes. “Because you’ve just witnessed the great Sherlock Holmes, the cold, clever, calculating detective, falling to spectacular, sobbing pieces over your fallen body. And you _do_ know, you’ve always known, that he would do _anything_ at all to keep you alive and safe and happy. He loves you as only such an astonishing man is capable of love, and he always has done. Since that very first night.”

Watson smiles that soft, secret sort of smile again, and reaches out his beringed hand to straighten the collar of John’s leather jacket. “Maybe,” he says softly, “maybe the reason for my being here is to help you finally realize all that. And to lend a little… perspective, I suppose. Shed some light on what you’re willfully ignoring by showing you what he and I can never have.” His smile grows wistful as he meets John’s eyes again, and John can’t think of anything to say, so he stays quiet as the other him looks down at his ring.

“Sherlock Holmes,” muses Watson, his face so bright with love that the possibility of it nearly takes John’s breath. “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and never one without the other. Imagine it, John. It’s already true in most of the important ways—what’s stopping you from taking that last, miraculous step?”

John’s voice still won’t come to him, but he feels an answering smile flooding on to his own face, and that seems to be enough for Watson, who claps him on the shoulder with jovial vigor.

“Well then,” he says, his voice cheerful and just a little sharp. “Not to leave the thing on a sharp note, as it were, but, to use the parlance of your time, make sure you don’t fuck it up, there’s a good chap.”

And before John can begin to formulate a reply, Watson slams both hands, _hard_ , into his chest and he feels himself falling backwards and the high, blaring scream of the defib picking up the steady, rapid rhythm of his heart.

 

He hears a little moan of what could be relief or terror from somewhere to his left, and suddenly becomes aware that his hand is being clasped almost painfully hard, his fingers twisted in between the long, thin ones that he knows belong to Sherlock.

John squeezes them, feebly; unable to do any more with the oxygen mask impeding his mouth, but his eyes immediately find Sherlock’s as they blink blearily open.

Now that he’s looking for it, he can’t help but see the painfully obvious fact of Sherlock’s feelings reflected in his bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes. He looks terrible, wrecked—his hair is a tangled fright from where he’s raked his hands through it, his skin blotchy and stained with tears he hasn’t bothered to brush away. His mouth is trembling still, but opens in a huge, relieved sigh as he returns the pressure of John’s fingers with his own.

“John,” Sherlock whispers as the paramedics bustle around the two of them, ignored but for their utility by both.

John cannot answer him—he feels like he just got punched in the chest by a former army captain—but lets his face soften into what he knows is the same joyful, loving expression that Watson had worn when speaking about Holmes, but which John has always tried to school from his features when he’s looking at Sherlock.

“He’s stable,” announces one of the paramedics from somewhere to his right. He does not look that way, or acknowledge having heard her. His gaze never wavers from Sherlock’s, who looks caught somewhere between relief and joy and trepidation and doubt. He tries to withdraw his fingers from John’s, but John uses all his strength to cling on to them, linking his own fingers securely through and around Sherlock’s and squeezing quickly three times before maintaining steady pressure on their joined hands.

Sherlock’s face fogs with uncertainty for just a moment before his expression clears, and the soft, genuine smile that lights up his face could not be more clear if John were the world’s only consulting detective.

Sherlock squeezes his hand three times back, and then holds steady pressure on John’s. It is not painful. It is firm and real and really happening, and it is worth all the pain he’s ever felt to have Sherlock beside him like this as the ambulance rumbles into the A&E receiving bay at Barts.

Sherlock’s smile is true and certain, and his hand is hot and real, and John knows with a flash of breathtaking certainty that there is nothing in the entire world—not now, not at any point in human history—that could ever convince him to let it go.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I've been creeping around the edges of Tumblr for awhile, but have never gotten one myself until recently. I am sort of at the beginning stages of research for what I hope will become a larger sociology project/ethnography of fandom (I'm a sociology Masters student by trade right now), so I did actually make one just recently. 
> 
> Guys, it's addicting. (And I am super late to the party, I know.) I made my page about 15 minutes before the trailer aired, and just watching my dash BLOW UP was about the most gratifying thing I've ever seen. I'm still navigating my way around, but I hope you (those of you who also frequent that platform) will be patient with me as I try to figure it out. :) 
> 
> If you want to, you can follow me at wearthedamnhatholmes.tumblr.com. :)
> 
> Thanks as always to this lovely community for the support and inspiration. Leave a comment if you like-- I'd love to hear what you think!


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